Sarah Pinborough was born in Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire, England. Her father was a career diplomat, and she lived abroad in Syria, India, the Sudan, Moscow, and elsewhere as a child. She spent ten years in British boarding schools, ‘‘did lots of bad things’’ in her twenties (including running table-dancing clubs in London), was briefly married, and trained to be a secondary school teacher. From age 30 she spent six years